The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

Forever Young

Chapter 4 takes a full detour away from Ramanujan and focuses on G. H. Hardy. Kanigel gives a detailed portrait of Hardy’s physical features and mentions that although he was an attractive man, Hardy did not view himself as such. Hardy was a devout atheist and had earned himself a reputation as a math genius. Hardy’s outward behavior often clashed with his natural temperament. For example, he would not shake hands and hated small talk, but he was also considered charming by many who knew him. Importantly, Hardy was brought up in a newly forming middle class and was not considered part of Britain’s gentrified class.

Horseshoe Lane

Kanigel continues his discussion of Hardy, including his childhood and some of the historical backdrop, namely the growth of new public schools meant to serve the growing middle class. One of these schools was Cranleigh, where Hardy would attend, an experience that would shape how he viewed people. Kanigel provides anecdotal evidence supplied by longtime Hardy friend C. P. Snow that Hardy’s schoolteacher parents were demanding of him and his sister Gertrude. Hardy appeared to have a natural gift for mathematics, having shown this knack as early as two years old. Hardy left Cranleigh to pursue a scholarship at the historic and elite Winchester at age 12.

Flint and Stone

Winchester was much more aligned with a tradition of elitism than Cranleigh. Embedded in the rituals of the public school were systems whereby older students would haze and bully younger students. Hardy did not feel much at home at Winchester and sought acts of quiet rebellion. He also sought escape in cricket, which became for him a lifelong obsession. He was not a player on the school team, a fact which left Hardy even further disgruntled toward Winchester. Kanigel also touches on Hardy’s general intellectual inclinations outside of mathematics, first of which was his writing excellence and his involvement with the school newspaper. Hardy was a nascent genius in math, but he had a well-rounded intellectual mind.

A Fellow of Trinity

In 1886, Hardy accepted a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, rather than Oxford like most other Winchester students. Kanigel provides a brief history of the British university system, including Oxford and Cambridge, discussing how the larger university contains within it colleges such as King’s and Trinity. The palpable history of Trinity was apparent to Hardy from the onset, though he was less impressed because he was coming from Winchester, a school even older than Trinity. As part of the mathematics curriculum, a student had to undergo a rigorous series of examinations called the Tripos. One might find similarities in the dissertation defenses of modern doctoral candidates, though the Tripos had been so firmly established by Hardy’s time that it was something of an institution in itself. With Hardy’s particularly rebellious intellectual bent, the Tripos was a particularly challenging affair. While Hardy saw the imagination as central to the practice of mathematics, something that would eventually draw him to Ramanujan, the Tripos discouraged it. The Tripos hung over Hardy’s time at Trinity like a dark cloud, and he began reconsidering whether to pursue math at all. Eventually, Hardy came around and met the immense obligation of passing through the Tripos, the first part in 1899 and the second part the following year.

“The Magic Air”

Kanigel chronicles Hardy’s social life and the exclusive group of which he was part, known as the Apostles. Famous associates in the group included the notable philosopher Bertrand Russell, and literary figures Leonard Woolf, future husband of Virginia Woolf, and Lytton Strachey. Kanigel mentions Hardy was perhaps considered by peers to be gay, though he also points out that much of the discussion of Hardy’s sexuality is post hoc speculation because very little true proof can be found. Hardy was extremely protective of his reputation regarding his sexuality.

The Hardy School

In 1903, Hardy was named an M.A., the highest degree offered at English universities at the time. His career took off in earnest when he began lecturing at Trinity in 1906. In 1910, he was elected to membership in the Royal Society, a testament to his mathematical gifts and acumen. Hardy also began to advocate a change in how the British viewed mathematics. He saw the tendency to favor applied mathematics as a limitation on pure mathematics, which is what interested him and which mathematicians from the European continent practiced with much success. Kanigel returns to a discussion of the Tripos and its ranking system that classified candidates according to ability, giving them the name of “wranglers.” Hardy saw the Tripos as the representation of England’s flawed approach to mathematics and began advocating changes to the Tripos system. Meanwhile, in 1908, Hardy published the seminal book A Course of Pure Mathematics, which would form the bedrock of English math instruction for decades to come. In 1913, as Hardy’s career and reputation rounded into full bloom, he received Ramanujan’s fateful letter.